GREAT INTERVIEWS
Reality and Reason

In Heaven and on Earth
From Aristotle to Baudelaire, from his daughter Ester to his neighbor in a waistcoat and bowtie, FABRICE HADJADJ digs “deep into everything so as to find God” in his recent book release. He shows that the beginning of all knowledge is one thing alone, wonder, and that reality, all of reality, is a sign.

by Fabrizio Rossi

“A word of advice: if you are reading this in an armchair, on a train, or during a lunch break in front of a PC, shut everything down and go out, either onto the balcony, into the courtyard, or, better, into the country. Because we have addressed the subject of what it means truly to know reality, and we have discovered that everything passes away, much more than we can imagine–everything, whether a blade of grass, a lily, or an apple.” These are the words of Fabrice Hadjadj, 39, already counted amongst today’s outstanding French Catholic thinkers. He is a polyhedral intellectual, author of works of philosophy, but also of theatrical pieces, and a man who, rather than pursuing  an academic career, prefers to teach in a high school near Toulon. He has been a traveler all his life–born into a family of Tunisian Jews and Maoist militants, at the age of 30 he asked for Baptism. Of his conversion, he says, “The journey is not over, it has only just begun.” At the conclusion of the Rimini Meeting, when he will present the new volume of Fr. Giussani’s conversations with CL university students, he will certainly have much more to tell. In Hadjadj’s book, La Terre chemin du ciel  [Earth, the road of heaven] (éditions du Cerf, 2002) the reader is led, through curiously entitled chapters like “The Manure that is Good for the Spirit,” or “The Father in the Louse,” to “dig deep into everything so as to find God.”
You don’t need to be particularly brilliant to grasp the correspondence with the route developed by Julián Carrón at the Spiritual Exercises of the Fraternity of CL (see the booklet included with this issue of Traces)–the dynamic of the sign, for a start.

What do you mean when you say that the earth is a road the leads to God?
Everything is a sign and refers to something beyond itself. Even the roots of a flower like a dandelion plunge into the Mystery. Be careful, though, the title I chose doesn’t say simply that the earth is a road toward heaven, but that it is a road of heaven, because it is heaven that molded what we see: in creating even the tiniest thing, God builds a new dwelling for Himself. If we were to see the earth only as a road toward heaven, then we would be wrong.

Why?
It would be like saying that the earth is a kind of optional accessory. How could we see, in a person near us, only a means of reaching God? We cannot reduce things to mere means, because they, too, are wanted, just as they are. When I speak of Mystery, I don’t mean anything spectacular. As the poet Yves Bonnefoy says, transcendence is the most ordinary of things–think of a child’s face, the beauty of a flower… In the absence of prejudice, everything reminds us of the Mystery.

What function does the sign have for our knowledge of reality?
We have to start off from experience. Where do we see that things are a sign? Take the three most striking cases: the experience of beauty, of truth, and of good. I think the first is what refers us more directly to the Mystery, because it strikes our heart. Baudelaire had understood this well when he was describing the melancholy aroused in him by something beautiful, which reminded him of a Paradise from which he felt himself exiled. The experience of truth is in every effort of ours to get to know something. Even if it is only a blade of grass, it refers me to the mystery of the whole cosmos–what is its first cause? Then there is the experience of good, which can happen before a superabundance just as before the lack of something.

In what sense?
Christians often speak of the second, for example stressing that nothing here below can satisfy our desire, which is made for God. I think, though, that we should not forget the superabundance of things. As Fr. Giussani recalled, we are called to live the hundredfold here on earth. I am thinking of the enormous joy I experience playing with my daughters. It is a different taste for things, which provokes me to ask myself why this good, which is thought up just for me, exists. Where is the origin of this generosity? It is by starting off from beauty and from the goodness of creatures that I reach their source. In this sense, we can say that the whole of being is a sign of the Mystery, and the more I go toward heaven, the more heaven, in its turn, reminds me of earth.

What do you mean?
For us, the sign is often a stage to pass through, as if at a certain point we could say, “I have found God, I don’t need the earth any more.” Instead, the more I turn to the Creator, the more I turn to creatures. He is the one who wanted them, so I could not be in friendship with the Creator without being so with His creatures. It is what happens in the Ascension–going up to heaven and, at the same time, descending upon the smallest things of the earth. Christ’s Ascension is not an escape, but the way of being the fullness of everything. Don’t you find it magnificent? We are not asked to detach ourselves from earthly things, but to go to their origin, and this origin is heaven.

So Christ shows us the way we can truly relate to reality?
Yes, but the problem is that we have reduced all this to a series of rules. We forget that He invites us to contemplation. As I often say, we could reduce the commandments to two. The first, at the origin of Christianity, is in Christ’s invitation, “Look at the lilies of the field.” He does not simply say they are lilies, but says, “Look at them!” And He shows us how, by contemplating them, we are introduced into the mystery of providence. The second commandment, at the end of Christian life, consists in these words to the faithful servant: “Enter into the joy of your lord.” We are not masochists–the Cross is not an end in itself, it is for glory. We Christians are not looking for suffering, but for joy. God, living in joy, wanted to communicate it to all men. This is why He sent it down into our misery, nailing it to the Cross. At that point, the Cross became the way toward joy. Christianity is not at all morality and prohibitions–first and foremost it is wonder before things.

At the Rimini Meeting last year, you affirmed that it is this experience that lies at the root of every attempt to know reality…
It is what Aristotle said: the origin of philosophy is wonder. At times, wonder is linked to naivety, or even stupidity. In fact, when I am struck by wonder I may feel a little stupid. It does take a certain measure of humility to be wonderstruck. At the same time, though, it is the highest form of intelligence, because there my reason opens up to the mystery. I am picturing the open eyes of my daughter Ester, who asks herself the reason for everything. Many philosophers, like Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and even Martin Heidegger, have given room to this experience of wonder, while others have totally despised it.

That was the case with Descartes, to whom the first part of your book is dedicated.
According to him, “Cogito, ergo sum” [“I think, therefore I am”], but the first human disposition would then be doubt, the exact opposite of wonder. This interpretation has marked the whole of modernity. But, in fact, Descartes sets himself between these two positions. In his treatise, The Passions of the Soul, for example, he writes that man’s first affection is admiration. So, if we look carefully, even Descartes had to admit that what permits one to doubt reality is the fact of having admired it. It is precisely because I look for a meaning and a truth that I can subsequently doubt it. Without the former, even doubt would not be possible. Or think of the anguish in the face of death of which Heidegger speaks. It is often reduced to this, but in order to have that anguish, you must first  have been struck by wonder before reality; without this experience before life, deprivation of it would not provoke any anguish.

So how is it that we are often tempted to halt this journey, stopping at the surface?
There is something that prevents us from truly knowing being: a reduction of the world to utility, to material that is to be manipulated. When we are prisoners of this practical concern, reality fades away; we abandon contemplation in favor of praxis, of action. Then a deformation tied up with our pride comes into play. There is in us an ingratitude that prevents us from acknowledging the Mystery. To acknowledge goodness outside ourselves means accepting that it is not up to us to judge things. If we have received life, then we are not masters of it.

From a certain point of view, though, we cannot do without practical concerns…
Certainly, praxis is necessary–we don’t live on air. The world itself needs what we do. But we must not forget where the root of our action lies and what its end is–contemplation. Think of how Eden is described in Genesis: “God caused to spring up from the soil every kind of tree, enticing to look at and good to eat.” First comes contemplation (“enticing to look at”), then action (“good to eat”). Then when the serpent invites the woman to taste the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, she sees that “it was good to eat and enticing to look at.” The order is reversed: sin begins with action, and moves on to contemplation–reduced to a kind of spectacle that helps us to digest–and then goes back to action. Life is lived in activism, and in disorder, because an action is ordered only if one starts off by considering reality and the needs of the heart. Whoever wants to act without this, as though he were a god and decides what is good and evil, may have the best intentions, but he becomes a destroyer. We don’t realize it, but the distortion is already there.

Where do you see this danger today?
Think, for example, of the fear of life. Life is no longer accepted as it is given; people try to transform it starting from an idea. Then, instead of welcoming a child, we make a product. Starting from a design of perfection, we reduce the being to its functions. Instead of perfection, we get a degradation of being to a utility. On the contrary, if I welcome the other who is given to me, I truly welcome the mystery of life. Life lies not in its practical performance, but in its enjoyment. In this way, I enter into the poet’s way of looking at things.

In this sense, in your book, the descriptions you make of your neighbor with his leather briefcase, waistcoat, and bowtie are moving. “Ah! Victor Franchon, with what tender astonishment must I look at you from now on… God is everywhere, but especially there, in the depths of your soul.”
Really, we do not need to move very much to reach the infinite. The other, even the most ordinary person, completely gray, is always an abyss. Chesterton, for example, said that the astounding thing is not that someone has this or that kind of nose, but that he has a nose. Even though the expulsion from Paradise changed our heart, obscuring the faculty of contemplation, this is a concrete experience that anyone who looks attentively can have.

So what does the encounter with Christ add to this dynamic of knowledge?
Take care here–Christ exalts it but not because He adds something. Every experience of the Mystery is an experience of Christ: since He is God, He is at the origin of everything. We are not always aware of it, but it is not an option that can be there or not. That is why I like it when Fr. Giussani writes that Christ’s teachings are nothing other than the “order of reality”–it’s not a question of adding anything. The point, perhaps, is bringing to fulfillment what already was. Like St. Paul, who, at the Areopagus, revealed what the Athenians had been worshipping without knowing it. This is the mission we are called to, in front of every “M. Franchon” we meet: to announce Him who has always been accompanying him.